JERSEY CITY -- Early in Steve Fulop's political career, abatement was a four-letter word.

Fulop in 2005 blasted then-Downtown Councilman E. Junior Maldonado for being absent "unless a big developer comes knocking on the door of City Hall looking for a tax abatement." After unseating Maldonado, Fulop voted against almost every Downtown abatement, saying incentives were not needed for waterfront projects. He griped that abatements denied funding for local schools.

But since Fulop became mayor four years ago, tax abatements have emerged as an unlikely attack line for critics of the mayor, who unseated Jerramiah Healy in 2013 after spending two terms on the council attacking Healy's abatement policy.

Fulop and his supporters say he has followed through on his campaign promises to use abatements to encourage development in areas of the city outside of the Downtown and scale back abatements near the waterfront. Critics point to continued Downtown abatements, including one lucrative deal that includes $20 million in city-issued bonds, as evidence that Fulop has made a reversal on a central issue.

In Healy's first full term as mayor, the council approved 52 abatements lasting 10 or more years, 21 of them Downtown. Healy was less generous with these abatements in his second term: 26 total, six Downtown. Under Fulop, the council has approved 43 long-term abatements, 14 Downtown.

After Fulop became mayor he unveiled a policy that encouraged longer abatements to to non-Downtown projects. Downtown developments could get sweeter deals if the developers, say, built a school or funded afterschool jobs for teens. The policy was revised in 2015 to reward developers who agreed to build affordable housing.

Fulop's Downtown abatements include a 25-year deal for a two-tower project at Metro Plaza; a 17-story residential building on Marin Boulevard that will avoid conventional taxes for 20 years; a 52-story Columbus Drive tower with a 25-year abatement; and 20-year tax breaks for two hotels. Thirty-year abatements were reserved for project in areas of the city where large-scale development had stalled: five in Journal Square, three on the New Jersey City University campus, one in McGinley Square and three for Ocean Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive.

Fulop has argued that he approved Downtown abatements for projects with specific benefits for the city. He cited the Metro Plaza and Marin Boulevard towers, which will each have an 80/20 mix of market-rate and affordable housing.

"If you look at the long-term abatements overall we've certainly done less than prior administrations and particularly Downtown right?" Fulop said in an interview. "We've done drastically less of them and if you look at the ones we've done they've been hotels, they've been 80/20 projects of affordable housing, commercial buildings ... we followed through exactly what I campaigned on."

It's true Fulop did not always express hostility for abatements. In a 2013 interview with The Jersey Journal, he said they were "an important tool" to spur development. But in the same interview, he called abatements "a drug" that give developers "a sense of entitlement."

"Every tax break you give ... hurts the county, it hurts the schools," he said then.

SCHOOL FUNDING

Homeowners who are traditionally taxed see their taxes go to the municipality, the county and the school district. The split in Jersey City is 50 percent for the city, 26 percent for schools and 23 percent for the county.

New Jersey allows the city to keep all the revenue it collects from tax abatements. An extra charge equaling 5 percent of the city's haul goes to the county. The schools are not required to get any.

Ellen Simon, a former school board member and Fulop 2013 supporter who has become sharply critical of the mayor, said voters were fooled four years ago. Simon's chief complaint about Fulop is his reversal on a 2013 promise that the city would immediately begin sharing abatement revenue with the school district. It did not.

"The idea was we'd get a progressive mayor, we'd get a progressive council, we'd get progressive policies," Simon said. "What we've gotten instead are a bunch of tax breaks for millionaire developers and a broken promise to share revenue with the schools."

"It didn't happen until we threw this party and embarrassed him," Simon said.

FUTURE OF ABATEMENTS

Not every developer seeking a tax break gets one. Fulop announced in May that Jersey City would not support a 30-year abatement sought by Kushner Companies and KABR Group for their One Journal Square project. Fulop said the deal sought by the developers, which included a request for $30 million in city-issued bonds, "doesn't work for us."

The move was largely seen as Fulop's way of distancing himself from presidential son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, whose family runs Kushner Companies, and not as a signal that long-term tax breaks may soon evaporate as a tool to motivate developers to build in the heart of Jersey City.

Council President Rolando Lavarro, a loyal Fulop ally who like the mayor is seeking re-election in November, declined to say definitively whether the days of 30-year tax breaks for Journal Square projects are over. But Lavarro indicated, as he did last August, that developers may not see the kinds of city subsidies they have in the last four years.

"The abatement program, in my eyes, is an inventive to revitalize and get development going," he said. "As areas like Journal Square begin to come up, those incentives become less necessary."